Though Adam Bede is a well-constructed novel, critics have unanimously found fault with two things in it: the harsh treatment meted out to the poor wandering Hetty and the mechanical marriage of Adam and Dinah. According to George R. Creeger, Hetty’s transportation for the murder of her child through Arthur does not fully square with George Eliot’s conception of suffering as a prerequisite of her protagonist’s regeneration. “In all frankness it is not much of a regeneration, particularly when compared with that of Adam or even of Arthur; for although Hetty is no longer hard, is able to ask Adam’s forgiveness, and is willing in turn to forgive Arthur, the only new life she faces is that of exile. Pardoned from execution, she is nevertheless transported to the colonies, where she dies some years later. George Eliot might just as well have had her hanged to begin with. As a matter of fact it is at this point that Hetty becomes the victim of her creator; for after all allowance has been made. Hetty there is some of the same hardness in George Eliot she deplores in other. That there could be no room for Hetty in Loamshire is, from a symbolic point of view, bad enough; that apparently there could be no room for her anywhere in George Eliot’s scheme of things stands as an indictment against the ethic the book suggests.” But Creeger considers the marriage of Adam and Dinah very necessary for their growth into maturity in terms of George Eliot’s religion of humanity which makes mutual love between men and women a pre-condition for the development of their potentialities. Walter Allen says, “One cannot help revolting against what seems her creator’s vindictiveness towards Hetty.” Hetty’s pretty sensuality is beautifully rendered: everyone in the novel who meets her feels it, and so does the reader. But for George Eliot it seems a bad mark against her, something in itself reprehensible.
George Eliot, we learn from her biographers, was perhaps over-conscious of what she construed as her own ugliness, and it sometimes appears that in her fiction she had to mortify women beautiful as she herself was not. She could not, one feels, forgive sexual passion. Hetty has to suffer because she has fallen a victim to it herself and arouses it in others. “The lack of feeling for sexual passion, indeed, this deliberate turning way from it, makes Adam Bede’s marriage to Dinah at the end of the book difficult to accept. And here a further complication obtrudes: neither Adam nor Dinah quite convinces. The ‘good’ characters set in contrast to Donnithorne and Hetty, they are too good to be true.
Lettice Cooper remarks, “The weakness of the book, besides the oppressive virtue of Adam and Dinah is, as with many Victorian novels, the sacrifice of probability to plot, and the tidiness of the ending. George Eliot was moving towards a new kind of novel in which representation of life was to more important than the resolution of a plot, but she was still partly bound by the old convention. Hetty’s pardon, so dramatically and improbably brought to the place of execution by Arthur Donnithorne, is an artificial device to spare the reader. In the relationship between Hetty and Arthur, and in all that grows out of it, there is a sense of destiny which is falsified by this resolution. Again, while Adam’s love for Hetty is utterly convincing and the thing that brings him most to life as a human being, his final marriage to Dinah has none of that inevitability, but seems like a mechanical device to round off the story.”
Henry James points out that ‘the central figure of the book is Hetty Sorrel and the story should have ended with the conviction of Hetty. The continuation of the story after that point is fatal to the artistic integrity of the novel. If the story had ended, as I should have infinitely preferred to see it end, with Hetty’s execution, or even with her reprieve, and if Adam had been left to his grief, and Dinah Morris to the enjoyment of that distinguished celibacy for which she was so well suited, then I think Adam might have shared the honours of pre-eminence with his helpless sweetheart. But as it is, the continuance of the book in his interest is fatal to him. His sorrow at Hetty’s misfortune is not a sufficient sorrow for the situation. that his marriage at some future time was quite possible and even natural, I readily admit but that was matter for a new story.”
In answer to all the aforesaid critics it may be sad that Hetty cannot escape punishment for abandoning her newly born baby to its death in the wood, that the novel cannot end with her transportation as it is intended to study her life in relation to the lives of the other characters in it, and that the marriage of Adam and Dinah is necessary not only for the restoration of the harmony of their community which has been disrupted by Hetty’s seduction by Arthur but also for their growth into maturity. As Alan W. Bellringer says, “The coming together of Adam and Dinah, both exemplary figures, yet restrained by difficulties in their attitudes, is handled with considerable delicacy. Their un-claiming mutual regard is compared with ‘little quivering rain-streams’, ‘the first detected signs of coming spring’, ‘the tiniest perceptible budding’. The passionate partnership which these two can form is, I think, well suggested. It is essential for its success that Adam offer Dinah freedom of religious conscience. She will continue to teaching as a Methodist, only with more means now to make the sick comfortable. Adam argues that ‘feeling’s a sort of knowledge,’ so that her married life would equip her with experience which would help her in counseling others. With this viable arrangement in prospect, Dinah’s vision of Jesus ‘pointing to the sinful’ begins to appear less imperious and frightening. ‘She was so accustomed to think of impressions as purely spiritual monitions, that she moves towards him for his embrace, admitting that without him she had lost ‘fullness of strength’ for the ministry. With Adam, Dinah is able to combine practical religion with family life, and it is clear that, despite the late Methodist Conference’s ban on women-preachers, she is not held from other kinds of teaching.”
No comments:
Post a Comment